If your community is in Europe, where you host matters as much as the hardware. Frankfurt is consistently the best choice for EU game servers — here's why, and what ping to actually expect from your region.
Quick answer
Frankfurt is the best location for EU game servers because it is home to DE-CIX, the world's largest internet exchange by traffic, and sits near the centre of Europe. Networks there connect directly to almost every European ISP, so players from the UK and France to Poland, Romania and the Balkans get lower and more stable ping than from the edge of the continent.
The networking heart of Europe
Frankfurt is home to DE-CIX, the largest internet exchange point in the world by traffic. A huge share of European internet traffic passes through the city, which means networks there are exceptionally well-connected to the rest of the continent.
For a game server, that translates directly into lower, more stable ping for players spread across the EU — from the UK and France to Poland, Romania and the Balkans.
What exactly is DE-CIX?
DE-CIX Frankfurt is an internet exchange point — essentially a giant, neutral meeting room where hundreds of networks plug in and hand traffic to each other directly, instead of routing it through several intermediary providers. It regularly handles traffic peaks in the multiple-terabits-per-second range, more than almost any other exchange on earth. For a server, being plugged in here means shorter, more direct paths to the rest of Europe.
Central = low average ping
Ping is dominated by physical distance. A server in the geographic and network centre of Europe minimises the average distance to all your players, rather than being great for one country and bad for the rest.
- Short, direct routes to most of Western and Central Europe.
- Excellent peering with major ISPs and carriers.
- Dense connectivity to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where many gaming communities are based.
Frankfurt vs other popular EU server locations
London, Amsterdam, Paris and Warsaw are all solid, well-connected cities, but each tends to favour its own region: London is excellent for the UK and Ireland, Amsterdam for the Benelux and Nordics, Warsaw for Eastern Europe. Frankfurt sits at the geographic and network middle of all of them, which is why it consistently produces the lowest average ping across a mixed EU playerbase rather than being lopsided toward one corner of the continent.
What ping to expect from major EU countries
Exact numbers vary by ISP and route, but as a rule of thumb, players in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic typically see the lowest pings to Frankfurt. France, Italy, the UK, Romania and the Balkans usually land a little higher — still excellent for real-time gaming — while more distant regions naturally see more, though still workable, latency.
Routing matters as much as distance
Two servers the same distance away can have very different ping if one is poorly routed. Because Frankfurt is so densely peered, traffic tends to take short, direct paths — fewer hops, less latency and fewer of the routing detours that cause lag and packet loss. Ping isn't the only thing that matters either: see what causes packet loss for why jitter and drops can hurt more than a few extra milliseconds.
Built for protection too
Frankfurt's connectivity isn't just good for latency — it's also where large-scale DDoS scrubbing capacity lives. Hosting there lets us route every server through our multi-Tbps filtering network without adding meaningful latency. For a deeper look at how our network is put together, see inside the ESAGAMES network.
Frankfurt gives you the best of both worlds: the lowest average ping in Europe, and the room to absorb terabit-scale attacks.
That's why every ESAGAMES game server is hosted in Frankfurt on our own well-peered network — low latency for your players, with Anti-DDoS built in.